Joseph Conrad: A Life

Citation

Dixon, D. (2008), "Joseph Conrad: A Life", Library Review, Vol. 57 No. 8, pp. 646-647. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530810899676

Zdzislaw Najder's acclaimed biography of Joseph Conrad first appeared in 1981 in Polish and was subsequently translated into English and French. Since then a large amount of hitherto inaccessible archival material in Poland and the Ukraine has become available, alongside some important early English correspondence. As a result of this, an expanded edition was published firstly in Polish in 1996. The new English edition is a major revision with a quarter of the text completely new.

The author's aim was to document the facts surrounding life of Konrad Korzeniowski and this he does admirably. While serving on a British ship, his name became anglicized and it is as Joseph Conrad that he is known in English. This is a biography and not a work of literary criticism, despite the fact that much of the work is devoted to the, often troubled, background behind writing the novels and other works.

Conrad presents his biographers with many challenges. He was born into a Polish family in what is now the Ukraine and exiled as a child to Galicia (now Poland). The biographer is faced with a serious paucity of solid factual information at this stage of his life. For instance, it is impossible to pinpoint with any certainly the school he attended in Cracow. Then at the age of 17, he embarked upon a life at sea from the French port of Marseille. From this, almost by chance he entered the British merchant navy, learnt English and started to write, before embarking on his literary career in England.

All this means that source material is in Polish, French and English, and that it is by no means reliable. His wife's memoirs are dismissed as fanciful and Conrad compounded the problems by destroying his correspondence and he did not keep a diary. His own autobiography is suspect, as Najder regards it as projecting a self‐image, rather than containing reliable factual information.

The assiduous nature of the research is seen in over a hundred pages of footnotes that demonstrate an impressive dedication to the subject. The bibliography, too, is extensive. The work is, however, slightly let down by its two indexes which are not easy to use because of the long strings.

Despite the enormous problems with source material, Najder has produced an informative and highly readable book. The portrait that emerges is of a troubled personality. Despite his literary successes, he was plagued both by financial worries and his own chronic ill‐health as well as that of his wife and his son Borys.

Besides discussions of his writing, we also learn much about the literary world including his less than amicable relationships with his publishers and his relationships with other authors, including Wells, Henry James, Stephen Crane and Ford Madox Ford. The book provides an insight into the literary scene at the turn of the century.

In many ways, and through no fault of the author, this book is tantalizing. So many questions remain unanswered. What really happened during his early days in Marseille? Why did he marry an uneducated woman to whom he seems to have been so unsuited? Najder is careful not to embrace previous speculative theories and is prepared to suggest that, in many cases, answers simply are not available.

This is a magisterial book which explores a complex personality in a readable manner. It is surely the definitive work on its subject with its attention to detail and attempts to establish the truth about this highly private author.